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Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

Dear videographers, when you pick a "photorealistic" opening scene, make sure the first major object you see (the palm tree) doesn't look like its made of plastic. It also helps if you don't try and mix close up objects on far away objects (the transition from grass to what appears to be a white-sand delta or a glacier).

Also, if it is a glacier, snow and running water reflect light very differently.

Just three points in the first 10 seconds which puts "the battle for photo-real CGI has been won" on awful shaky ground.

It seems, to me, like photorealism is currently possible for static images, but the moment you add motion, it all goes to hell.

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> Dear videographers, when you pick a "photorealistic" opening scene

I kind of think that it was supposed to be an "uncanny valley" opening scene. The rest of the video is quite good; it's hard to imagine that they'd flub the opening so badly, unless it was on purpose.

In my opinion, none of the CGI they showed was really beyond the uncanny valley; most scenes which which weren't still photos or landscapes made predominantly of rock were still quite fake looking. Especially the "beyond" examples of Tarkin and Obama.

It's a shame you responded only to the title, because the content of the video is much better.

Time constraints, a rather visceral disagreement with the premise, and bouncing ogres on chairs (so avant-garde!) have postponed completion of the video for me.

So, watched the whole video finally (such a salty response to having to postpone watching more than the intro). I still think the premise is fundamentally flawed. The author tries to get around this by initially defining the uncanny valley as "how we got to today's CGI", and later by calling it "bad CGI" - but by either definition, there was no "good" cgi being shown; no truly post-uncanny valley content.

Admiral Tarken? Princess Leia? Faked Obama? All examples of "beyond", and all really, well, uncanny to watch.

I can't even honestly agree that the commercialized software has started to plateau. The software to create CGI - especially the software being used by the big studios - is evolving constantly. Even Blender changes on a monthly (or more frequent) basis.

For example, in How to Train Your Dragon, one person's time was solely devoted to improving the water splash dynamics. In Frozen, they devoted decades of processing time to rendering one 15 second scene with the ice castle. In Mad Max, the CGI was praised because it wasn't the primary method of creating the effects, because it didn't get in the way of the practical effects.

Can we eventually get there? Yeah, I think so. But we're not there yet. The software isn't finished; the hardware isn't fast enough. Perhaps it will come about in tandem with general AI.

Totally agreed with this. Faces have further to go. We're not out of the uncanny valley yet.

We're also unable to create emergent materials right now, because we don't right now (and may never) have the horsepower to do molecular-level simulation to find out how light interacts with the surface. For similar reasons, breaking something open like an egg, a log, or slicing open flesh is never going to yield truly emergent results. To some degree, they'll always have to be artistically approximated on a case-by-case basis. Those approximations may have increasingly sophisticated interactions as time goes on, but I am reasonably confident they'll never truly simulate things at the molecular level.

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